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[Shadowlord]

I've never played either of those. :V

[Reelya]

It's also a shame that it's now the poster-boy for proc.gen, giving proc-gen a bad rep. I've heard that one phrase "proc gen creates boring samey shit" over and over, but really only since No Man's Sky came out. Things that use proc gen are getting panned now, just because they use proc gen, not because of how they use it. But if you look at the classic examples of procgen, Rogue, Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, Diablo etc. Would we say that?

No, the problem is that they didn't have a fun high-level algorithm. Basically every planet was Perlin Noise (they could have used Voronoi-diagram based continent generation and added custom mesh features with parameters), and they had very few alien templates compared to e.g. Spore, and didn't connect them together in clever ways, e.g. if they'd proc-genned DF-style body plan trees. Plus, each planet was ultra-simplistic in it's "meta game", when they could have in fact pro-genned game rules for every planet, meaning that each planet had complex systems you'd need to uncover.

[NJW2000]

Not that the mainstream was saying a huge amount about procgen before, though, so I guess things may not have got worse, just failed to get better.

And there's always the odd procgen element that works in a game, which people hopefully won't forget. Bloodborne's chalice dungeons, for example. I mean, people disliked those, but that's close enough to success for a souls game. Or Fallout 4's special weapon drops.

But if the game's ALL about procgen, it's got to be radically different to most mainstream games just to be fun, and I dunno if triple-A companies are going to be able to handle something that different ever.

[Neonivek]

Not that the mainstream was saying a huge amount about procgen before, though, so I guess things may not have got worse, just failed to get better.

And there's always the odd procgen element that works in a game, which people hopefully won't forget. Bloodborne's chalice dungeons, for example. I mean, people disliked those, but that's close enough to success for a souls game. Or Fallout 4's special weapon drops.

But if the game's ALL about procgen, it's got to be radically different to most mainstream games just to be fun, and I dunno if triple-A companies are going to be able to handle something that different ever.

Yeah I don't think it is that the gaming community was blind to the inherent "Bland factor" aspect of procedural generation games... Heck people spoke about it back in the Terraria days.

So much that I think No Man's Sky has made people officially give up on it.

Basically a Proc generation game now needs to win people back rather then being able to entice people on "proceeedural generation OOoOooooooh" like they could before.

[hector13]

Has procedural generation been a big things for mainstream games recently? I always thought it was more of a niche, indy type thing.

[Neonivek]

Has procedural generation been a big things for mainstream games recently? I always thought it was more of a niche, indy type thing.

It really started to get public attention with Spore.

[Shadowlord]

It was most notably used back in ye olde 80s in Elite.

... Goddamn, my phone thought I meant Spore, not Elite, and Fhtagn, not Goddamn. Wtf.

[SOLDIER First]

Has procedural generation been a big things for mainstream games recently? I always thought it was more of a niche, indy type thing.

more of a niche, indy type thing.

indy

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Reelya]

Has procedural generation been a big things for mainstream games recently? I always thought it was more of a niche, indy type thing.

Proc gen is built into all the level editing tools. It's standard when you are e.g. making terrain and placing trees. It's absolutely necessary when creating open world games for example. Did someone sit and manually place all the trees in Morrowind for example? No way. big companies might not talk about it much but proc gen is at the heart of making many types of resource that go into games.

But there are tons of example of run-time procedural generation people don't know about or don't consider. Any game where there's a random maze is using proc gen. Some games which offered hundreds of levels back in the 1980s. There was no physical way those could exist, they used algorithms to make the levels. In fact, proc gen was very widely used in the 1980s because it can generate level data from very compressed code. It dropped off in the 1990s when they got CD-Rom level space to fill, but as games are getting ever-larger, it's coming back again. You just can't afford enough artists to make all the assets in a modern game by hand.

[Rolan7]

Heh, reminds me of one time in Far Cry 2.  Surprisingly beautiful and even realistic-looking game for the time.  I was going along a traintrack and...
Ooh, I found the screenshot I uploaded!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=234157502

[Shadowlord]

Clear proof of black magic at work! 

[Kot]

Proc gen is built into all the level editing tools. It's standard when you are e.g. making terrain and placing trees. It's absolutely necessary when creating open world games for example. Did someone sit and manually place all the trees in Morrowind for example? No way. big companies might not talk about it much but proc gen is at the heart of making many types of resource that go into games.=

Actually, yes, someone sit and manually placed all the trees in Morrowind. That was the big thing about it, unlike Daggerfall and later Oblivion and Skyrim, and it shows. And, considering the size of Vvardenfell, it's not that unreasonable really.

Clear proof of black magic at work! 

Not sure if you're just saying it was magic or specifically referring to the fact Far Cry 2 was set in Africa...

[Shadowlord]

Far cry 2 is set in Africa? I ignored both far cry and cry whatever after trying the demo for the first far cry.

No, I'd have said that no matter what the game was.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

All the Far Cry games are set in disparate locations, because they're all set in the same world but not connected by plot.

Anyway, not only did someone place all the trees in Morrowind, someones have, multiple times, replaced all the trees in Morrowind for both mods and full conversion.

[Neonivek]

I know it is silly but I am always amazed by how... well... mammals at least have full psychologies.